Gayatri Subramanian, Ph.D., a visiting fellow from the Innate Immunity and Pathogenesis Section of the Laboratory of Virology at Rocky Mountain Laboratories, will represent NIAID at the 2022 NIH Three-minute Talk (TmT) Competition on June 30, 2022. She scored the highest marks at the internal competition on May 6 to determine who would represent the institute at the NIH-wide competition. Designed to celebrate NIH fellows' research and harness the power of efficient communication, the NIH-wide TmT Competition is a modified version of the original Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition founded in 2008 by the University of Queensland in Australia. While the latter competition aims to create better research communication with the public, the NIH-wide competition targets the broad scientific audience found inside the NIH community.
Dr. Subramanian is no stranger to giving superb presentations. As a doctoral candidate at the University of Toledo in Ohio, she competed twice in her institution’s Queensland-based 3MT competition. After losing the audience award by only one vote in 2018, she tried again the following year and won, allowing her to compete in the 2019 national competition. As she prepares for the NIH competition, she credits her past 3MT experience and additional communication workshops provided by NIAID with helping her create a compelling short talk. When reflecting on her motivation to compete, Gayatri shares, "I enjoy talking about my science and I like the challenge that comes with the format of the TmT. I particularly wanted to present a ‘concept’ talk in this format as opposed to a data-driven presentation that is more common in scientific conferences."
Further crediting the mentorship and support she receives from her current principal investigator, Sonja Best, Ph.D., chief of the Innate Immunity and Pathogenesis Section, Gayatri emphasizes the importance of having mentor support for building core skills in presenting, grant writing, and manuscript writing. The Innate Immunity and Pathogenesis group uses flavivirus model systems to study pathogenic virus interactions with host immune systems responses. Distilling this kind of complex work into a TmT is no easy task, but Dr. Subramanian shares some suggestions, “The biggest challenge was the first draft. I began by writing down my speech, knowing that I needed about five hundred words to fill a three-minute talk. I referred to competition guidelines and paid careful attention to breakdown the story into three parts – one [aspect of my research] for each minute of the talk. I practiced with my postdoc friends with whom I have developed a constructive feedback loop.”
With one final thought on her experience so far, Gayatri said, “Science is personal to me and being able to convey what I do on a daily basis to my parents (who are educated non-scientists) is important to me.”
More information about the 2022 NIH Three Minute Talk (TmT) Competition on June 30, 2022 can be found on the NIH Calendar. Congratulations and good luck to Dr. Subramanian!